As she rode through the window and away from the building’s protection, wind buffeted the bag, the heavy line began to swing, and the sensation of falling was inescapable.
Hilda screamed and closed her eyes and screamed again. “And it was just about then, darlings,” as she told it later, “that I wet myself. I really did. I’m not a damned bit ashamed to say it.”
The wind was cold on her legs and it blew through the pulleys above her head with a banshee wail.
The rocking, swinging motions continued, the oscillations becoming wilder as she approached the center of the span.
“I thought I was going to die, I really did. And then I was afraid I wasn’t! I screamed for the damned thing to stop! You know. Stop the world, I want to get off! But there was no way. No way! And when I was a girl, I didn’t even like roller-coasters!”
She may have’ fainted; she was never sure.
“The next thing I knew, I was in Heaven! I mean the swinging had stopped, and the howling of the wind, and the biggest, strongest man I ever saw, darlings, just
plucked me out of that canvas sack like I was something coming out of a grocery bag. And he set me down on my feet and held me up or I would have gone flat on my face.” Pause. “Was I crying? Darlings, I was bawling like a baby, and laughing all at the same time!” Another pause. “And all the big man said was, ‘Okay, lady. It’s all over now.’ What he didn’t know was that I still dream about it and wake up trying to scream!”
Nat watched from the trailer doorway until the breeches buoy had returned to the Tower Room and for the second time emerged loaded. “I make it just over a minute,” he said. “At that rate—” He shook his head in silence and walked back inside to pick up the walkie-talkie. “Trailer to Oliver,” he said.
“Nice going, Chief.”
“Yeah, thanks.” There was a pause. “But what?” the chief said.
The big man is perceptive, tuned to nuances, Nat thought. “It’s going to take a long time to get them all,” I he said. He paused. “How about a second line, two breeches buoys working at once?”
The big man was also decisive. “No dice. At the angle we shoot from, we couldn’t get the lines far enough apart through those windows. Then in this wind they’d sure as hell foul each other, and we’d have nothing at all.” His voice was calm, but tinged with regret. “I thought of it. But it won’t work. We’ll have to do the best we can.”
Nat nodded slowly. “I know you will. Thanks, Chief.” He put the walkie-talkie down.
For every problem there is not necessarily a solution—true or false? Unfortunately entirely too goddam true. One hour and forty minutes, he thought, that’s all we need. All? Eternity.
Patty was at the desk, pencil and pad at hand, the telephone held to her ear by one hunched shoulder. “A-b-e-l, Abel,” she read back into the phone. “Three twenty-seven North Fiesta Road, Beverly Hills. Next, Governor … ?”
Nat listened to the names as Patty wrote them down and read them back:
“Sir Oliver Brooke—with an e—Ninety-three E-a-t-o-n Square, London South West One.”
That would be the British Ambassador, flown up only this morning from Washington.
“Henry Timms—double m—Club Road, Riverside, Connecticut.”
Head of one of the major networks?
Howard Jones, US Steel … Manuel Lopez y Garcia, Ambassador from Mexico … Hubert van Donck, Shell Oil Company, Amsterdam … Walter Gordon, United States Secretary of Commerce … Leopold Knowski, Ambassador from the USSR…
One name approximately every fifteen seconds. At that rate, it would take half an hour to list them all. Nat picked up the walkie-talkie. “Give us the names as you land them, Chief. We’ll want to know who—may get left.” He walked back to the doorway then and stood looking out at the plaza.
Firemen, police, gaping crowds. The orderly tangle of hoses and the sounds of pumping engines at work. Occasionally the booming voice of a bullhorn. The entire plaza was wet now, a dirty artificial lake. The tormented building still stood, of course, but in a hundred places smoke oozed out to obscure the no longer shining aluminum siding.
“Pretty, huh?” This was Giddings at Nat’s shoulder. His voice was low-pitched, angry. “Circus day. When I was a kid, Fourth of July was a big deal. Fireworks shooting out over the lake at night. People came for miles to watch.” He gestured at the crowds. “Like this.” He paused. “Maybe you can’t blame them, at that.”
Nat turned to look at him.
“They’ve never seen anything like it,” Giddings said. “Neither has anybody else.” He made a sudden angry hand gesture. “That goddamn Simmons.”
“He isn’t the only one.”
“Are you standing up for the son of a bitch?”
“No,” Nat said, “for more reasons than you know.
But,” he added, “neither am I letting the rest of us off the hook.”
“We should have caught it, you mean?” Giddings nodded. “All right. We’ve agreed to that before. But which is worse, doing the dirty or failing to catch it? Answer me that.”
It was a quibble, Nat thought, and found the question unworthy of answer. And yet he could understand Giddings’s need to ask it. A man had to salvage what he could of his self-respect, didn’t he? Didn’t everybody do it every day in many ways—the games people play?
Inside the trailer Patty’s voice said, “Willard Jones, Peter Cooper Village.”
Who was Willard Jones? Or did it matter who he was? It was a name that belonged to a person, now living, maybe soon to be dead. Did he, Nat, accept that now?
Face it, friend, Nat told himself, you have known almost from the beginning how this was going to come out—and he thought of the nineteen bodies in that burned-over mountain clearing.
But for them I had no responsibility.
What difference? The question echoed in his mind.
No one could have anticipated that all electrical power would go out; anybody in his right mind would have said that it was impossible. But so was the grid blackout impossible that had crippled the entire Northeast a few “years back. So were the Titanic sinking and the Hindenburg disaster, the wave of assassinations beginning with President Kennedy’s, and the violence in cities only how many summers ago? Impossible, but they happened.
Logic, he thought suddenly, had nothing to do with it. Logic was for law, for stately considerations of fact, unhurried judgments objectively taken. Logic was not for him.
He, Nat Wilson, was what he felt, the subjective man, not the man with the computer mind. And what he felt was a sense of guilt that would not wash away—ever.
That he had failed to find flaws in the building’s construction could be understood, explained, condoned, forgiven—but not by him. In the entire tangle of this day he was inextricably involved, woven right into the fabric of events even if with some of them he appeared to have no real connection.
He had never laid eyes on the two firemen who had died screaming in the stairwell. Or the other two now in the Tower Room, probably no better off. But he had recommended that they be sent up the long stairs, and even though it had been within Brown’s authority to ignore the suggestion, for Nat a sense of responsibility remained.
He had nothing to do with Bert McGraw’s death. True? False? Logic said one thing, sensibility the other. Because as Zib’s husband he had been insufficient, Zib and Paul had carried on their—thing. And somehow that had figured in McGraw’s heart attack, if Patty understood it at all.
So where did all that leave him?
I am glad you asked that question, sir.
The hell I am.
Am I a jinx?